McCartney talks Beatles, Nirvana reunions in radio interview

Sir Paul dialed into KROQ's "Kevin and Bean" morning show this week for brief chat.

He recounted, once again, being with John Lennon in New York in 1975 and discussing "Saturday Night Live" producer Lorne Michaels' joking offer to pay the Beatles $3,000 if they reunited on his show.

“We’re just sitting around and having a laugh and ‘Saturday Night Live’ came on, and [John] said, ‘Have you been watching this?’ ‘No, I’m living in England, why, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘They’ve got this amazing thing going on, where Lorne Michaels came on last week and he said I’m entitled to offer you, the Beatles, so much money[to reunite].’  It wasn’t an awful lot – it was the standard rate."

“So John said, ‘It’s a hoot, you know what would be great, we can go down there now. It’s only around the corner, we should show up.’ For about five minutes, we were going ‘We’ve got to do it.’ Then it was like, ‘Are you kidding, let’s stay in and watch the show, stay comfortable, if we go down there it’s gonna be crazy. It would be a great story,’ but we decided against it.”

This led to more discussion about why the Beatles chose never to reunite, despite numerous offers to do so:

“We talked about it, we certainly got offered a lot of money to do it, but it was one of those things, it was like, ‘You know what, guys? We’ve done it. We’ve come full circle. We’ve been through all the joys and the horrors of being in a band, we’ve done everything we wanted to do.’”

“‘If we get back together again, it could fall flat, we might not enjoy it, so why do it?’” he explained. “As we say in England, leave ‘em laughing.”

“Once or twice, it was quite tempting, we got some tempting offers. [But] Why spoil the whole thing and come out of retirement and have it not work, so we decided against it. I agree with you, it was the smartest move.”

Paul also discussed working with Dave Grohl and the other former members of Nirvana on the 2013 song, "Cut Me Some Slack."

“The thing about Dave is, he’s such an enthusiast, he’s a live wire,” McCartney said. “Anything you do with him is ‘up.’ As you know, you’ve interviewed him. He’s a very ‘up’ guy and it’s very infectious. I’m a great enthusiast too. So when he asked me to come along and do some music for the Sound City thing, I said, ‘Well, OK, we’ll see what happens.’ I got there and he said, ‘What are we going to do, should we do an old rock ‘n’ roll song?’ And he made a couple of suggestions. And I said ‘I’ve done that.’ A couple of the ones he mentioned I’d done with the Beatles. I said, ‘I don’t want to try to top those.’

“I’d just been given a new guitar by Johnny Depp, that little cigar box thing, I was so in love with it, I said, ‘Let me wail away on this and see what happens.’ I started kicking around on that, and Dave jumped in on drums, so there was no way there wasn’t going to be any chemistry. And then Krist [Novoselic] and Pat [Smear] started playing alongside us, and we suddenly had a big thing going. We listened to it, the first take was about 20 minutes and we said ‘What are we gonna do, should we structure it a little bit?’ So we agreed on what we were gonna do, got back in there, made the song, and it was all over in about three hours. All of us had a complete blast.
“In the middle of all of that, I didn’t know that I was in a Nirvana reunion,” he admitted. “I thought I was jamming with a bunch of guys. It was only when I heard them talking, ‘Hey, we haven’t done this in 20 years or something!’ I’m going, ‘What are you talking about, guys?’ ‘Well, you know, we’re Nirvana.’ I must admit, I didn’t even know, I said, ‘Oh, OK, that’s pretty cool.’”

And, finally, he said he doesn't mind at all talking about the Beatles days:

“I do enjoy it, it’s like talking about your college days, when you’re not in college anymore and there’s quite a few years gone by,” he said. “I’m looking back on it, it’s like looking at a scrapbook. People think sometimes, ‘I don’t want to bore you, I don’t want to ask you a Beatles question,’ I say, ‘No, it’s OK.’ I could be at a dinner party, and everyone is telling their stories, and I’m thinking, ‘It’d be good if they asked me a Beatles question, I’ve got a few stories there.’”